


don't break your hands, i'll hold them

by byjosten



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Andrew being soft for Neil, Andrew is there for him, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Hand & Finger Kink, In a sense, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Neck Kissing, Neil has an anxiety attack, Neil wanting to stay for Andrew, No Smut, Oral Fixation, Undiscovered, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:00:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23232088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byjosten/pseuds/byjosten
Summary: Neil has never been good at controlling his anxiety.Just a little oneshot drabble of Neil having a destructive anxiety attack and Andrew doing what he can to help.
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 28
Kudos: 384





	don't break your hands, i'll hold them

**Author's Note:**

> Just a thing I had in my head!! I hope you enjoy it <3
> 
> Thank you everyone for the support on my fics! I have so many different writing angles on here and you all support them all, and I'm so so grateful

Neil was zoned out by the time midnight rolled around. He should have been sleeping; instead, he stared up at the ceiling, eyes wide, chest heaving, as he tried to stay quiet, aware of Andrew sleeping in the bunk below him.

His entire body was a mess of weighted dread, settled in his shoulders, chest, thighs, knees. His nails had scratched off one layer of skin on the side of his hand, and was now trying to dig canals into his bare thighs. He always scratched when he got like this. Sometimes he forgot and was startled by the red scratches on his arms when he woke the next morning.

He couldn’t breathe properly, couldn’t do anything to say Andrew’s name, to alert him. But even as he was paralysed with anxiety, he was a live wire, unable to stay still. He sat up, clasped his shoulders, tried to dig his nails into bone to ground himself, and shuddered. He tapped out an irregular beat on his knees, clenched his fists so hard he left crescent shapes in his palms from his fingernails.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine,” he told himself, voice barely having the energy to go above a whisper. But no matter how many times he willed it to be true, the anxiety in him didn’t subside. He was gasping for breath, squeezing his knuckles in an attempt to break them just to have something to put pressure on. If he could just break one, the anxiety would go away. That’s what he thought.

He was jittery, jumpy, and couldn’t keep still for a second. Neil’s fingers yanked at his hair unkindly, tugging until it hurt but even the sting of that couldn’t distract him.

Neil didn’t realise there was someone in front of him until he bowed his back and stretched forward, grasping at sheets, trying to busy himself in any way possible to keep his body moving because if he stilled for a second he felt like he would die. His knuckles brushed a shin, and Neil pulled back sharply, fingers already twisting his knuckles again. His feet twitched, squirming in his socks, whilst one knee knocked against the side of the bed. He must have looked a state but he didn’t have the brain capacity to think or care.

“Neil.”

He couldn’t answer.

“Hey. Hey, Neil? You’re having an anxiety attack.”

It was Andrew’s voice but he couldn’t focus. An invisible hand had his lungs clenched and he was wheezing.

“Neil.”

He had a knuckle beneath the pressured mercy of a finger on his other hand, and he would break it. He  _ could  _ break it. Others had done it, had squeezed his knuckles so hard Neil had ground his teeth against crying out. Sometimes it had snapped; other times had just left him bruised. They broke so easily back then, why not now? He almost snarled in the back of his throat as he tried again.

“I like your hands, Neil, can you not break them for me?” That was Andrew’s voice again. It almost was enough to tap at the anxiety clouding his entire being, choking him, suffocating him. But it wasn’t enough--Neil couldn’t get out of it. He had to move. Andrew was in the way, and Neil wrangled himself into some sort of coherency to look desperately at him.

_ Please move, _ he wanted to say.  _ Let me go. _

But if Andrew heard his silent plea, he didn’t do anything. He just kept his gaze on Neil, not annoyed at being woken up, or bored, or anything. Just a calm, almost pained look.

That brought Neil back a little. Andrew looked  _ pained _ .

He clenched his knuckles again before releasing them in order to grasp the side of his bunk. White bone tried to burst through skin as he stared down at his hands, fixated on something--finally.

But he was still too alive, too much energy pumping through him--bad energy, not the kind that had him propelled down an Exy court. It was the kind of energy that told him he was going to die if he did anything, if he moved, whilst begging him to move. It was a conflicting thing, a war inside his own brain that Neil was ready to beg to stop.

He vaulted right over the side of the bed and couldn’t summon the energy to catch himself. His knees gave out and he crumpled on the floor, but he’d suffered worse. He shot up, heard a sharp curse, the creak of his bunk behind him.

“Neil, do not leave this room.”

He was a caged animal, pacing, pacing, unable to get out.

“Let me look after you then you can go. We’ll walk somewhere. Sound good?”

It didn’t sound anything right now. Neil was on another planet where only too much of  _ this  _ existed.

He didn’t realise he’d balled his fist, drew his arm back with the intention to slam it into the wall until fingers wrapped around his wrist and squeezed. “I won’t let you hurt yourself. I just told you, I like your hands. Stop trying to injure them. You think you could play tomorrow if your hands were broken? No. Neil, listen to me. What do you need?”

_ To get out. _

To get the energy out, himself out, his brain, gone. Neil didn’t know.

“Fine. Okay, you know what? Go ahead. But--give me a second.” Andrew snatched up a pillow from his own bunk bed and propped it against the wall. Before he could fully gesture at Neil to go ahead, Neil pummelled the pillow, but it didn’t help. It was too soft, and Neil needed something harder. Something to push back as hard as he did. He didn’t want his blows taken; he wanted them parried.

He moved back and sat back on Andrew’s bed, but was up again in the next breath. He couldn’t keep still for half a second. His fingers were back on his knuckles. This time it would work. This time he would break them and breaking his bones would snap the anxiety, staunch the flow of it into his body, driving him into this mess.

The words were right there, in his mind.  _ Tell Andrew you can’t process anything right now, you can’t think without this dread settling over you. You’re paralysed. You cannot move. Tell him, and he’ll understand. He’ll help. _ But Neil wanted to be as far away from anyone as possible, to block everyone out whilst he panicked alone.

There was a twisting ache from his middle finger on his right hand, and Neil cried out. A shot of blonde in his vision, and then Andrew was there, stood before him, and pried his own hands away from his grasp.

“I cannot trust you with these right now,” he told Neil like they were items rather than his hands. “So I’ll hold them.” But it was making Neil worse. He was being held down, that one thing stopping his hand movements feeling like it stopped his entire body. He couldn’t stop. Not for a second.

“Andrew--” he tried to choke out.

But then Andrew was putting a new sort of pressure on Neil’s knuckles, his fingers circling the ridges, thumb pressing into his palm, rubbing the tension out of his fingers. Neil’s hands hurt from clenching and trying to break things.

His foot tapped anxiously on the floor, his body jerking as he tried to regain control. He couldn’t. It was too far away.

“What do you need?” Andrew asked, eyes on Neil, his fingers on his hands. There was a soothing brush over the back of Neil’s hands, jolting him a little further into coherency. “Tell me.”

Neil shook his head. He didn’t know.

“Touch?” Andrew asked, because sometimes, when his anxiety wasn’t as bad as this, Andrew had gotten him off, the anxiety released from that. It would be quick and breathless but it worked. Neil didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, couldn’t comprehend anything, and because Neil didn’t give a clear answer, Andrew’s hands never moved past Neil’s wrist.

“A walk?”

He shook his head. He didn’t want to be outside. If he did, he would take off from Andrew and find the nearest place to burrow and die alone. That’s how his anxiety felt. All he had to do was curl up and he would die because there was no plausible way he could endure this battering of anxiety and live through it.

“Exy practice?”

It was midnight, and Neil’s brain wasn’t switched on enough to take note of anything. He shook his head again. Andrew released a sigh but it wasn’t exasperated or annoyed. It matched his expression before.

Hurting because Neil was hurting?

Andrew, with his rumpled bedhead, blonde hair sticking up at the back. Andrew, with his armbands off whilst he slept, arms bare, his black t-shirt half covering his muscled arms. He wore loose pyjama pants whilst Neil stood before him in gym shorts because he hadn’t been ready to sleep yet so hadn’t gotten changed.

Andrew, with his sleepy gaze and tight jaw whenever he fought back a yawn so Neil didn’t see. He was hurting for Neil. Because he was losing to anxiety and didn’t know what to do.

His fingers itched and jerked towards each other, even in Andrew’s hold.

“No, Neil.”

He looked at Andrew.

“We should get you some gloves,” Andrew muttered. His eyes fell on the scratches on Neil’s upper arms.

Neil shook his head. He didn’t want more confinement, more restrictions. Andrew just nodded in understanding.

Anxiety was a tidal wave, Neil was still drowning, but he could see Andrew trying to get him back to safe ground.

“Breathe with me, okay?” Andrew said, snapping his fingers in front of Neil’s eyes to get him to focus again. “Like this.” He demonstrated breathing deeply from his stomach, placing Neil’s hand over his abdomen so he could feel it and try to breathe in time. He held his breath for four seconds before releasing for seven. Neil counted.

Neil tried, but when he thought he’d found the rhythm, he tripped up on the seconds he was supposed to count for, and then his breathing was quick and fast and uncontrolled again. He shook his head, a strained noise coming from his throat.

“Hey, it’s okay.” Andrew’s voice was so soft. “It’s okay.”

Neil’s eyes fell on Andrew’s neck. The collar of his sleep t-shirt was low and loose, exposing enough pale skin that Neil was ensnared in the sight. Andrew noticed where his gaze fell to.

“Can I pull you closer?” he asked. Neil nodded.

Andrew tugged him forward by his hands. Neil let himself stumble forward, face falling into Andrew’s neck. It was his smell, the body wash from his shower earlier mixed with something that smelt like sleep and just  _ Andrew _ . It nudged at Neil’s anxiety until he realised his throat wasn’t cut off completely and he could speak.

It still wasn’t enough but he exhaled out of his nose as his lips touched Andrew’s skin. There was something soothing in the soft skin against his lips, and he nuzzled in, trying to breathe past the cinched feeling in his chest. He ran his lips back and forth over Andrew’s neck.

“I need--I think…” he tried. Their hands were clasped between them, pressed against Andrew’s chest.

“Do what you need,” Andrew told him. “I trust you.”

Neil closed his eyes. Even though his entire body wanted to curl up and do nothing whilst wanting to do everything, this was good. This helped. He drew skin between his lips and sucked lightly. Not enough to mark, that wasn’t his goal. But it felt good--it felt nice, something stimulating to focus on, to tell his brain it was different to when he kissed and marked Andrew’s neck when they were sexually intimate.

It  _ was  _ different.

He pressed closer, a quiet noise escaping him. His anxiety was slow to subside, and it still spread through most of his body but he could think past it, function past it. He was no longer fighting to get out or away. Even as he sucked, only for a second, until he found a new place to touch, he didn’t understand how it softened everything in him.

Andrew still kneaded his hands in his fingers, still distracted him from breaking his knuckles with that. But his thighs ached and clenched to not be still, and his toes curled until they cramped and Neil had to shudder his way through easing the tension. It was enough but  _ wasn’t  _ at the same time.

He pulled back, eyes on Andrew’s face. He pulled a hand free and lifted it to Andrew’s t-shirt. “Can I?”

Andrew nodded. Neil curled fingers in his t-shirt and pulled him back onto the bed. Andrew fell on top of him, pressed to him, making his body stay still even when Neil was jittery. Andrew pulled back, frowning down at him, unsure of what was happening.

“I just need… This. The pressure, keeping me still,” Neil tried to explain.

Andrew took a few seconds to understand, before he nodded. “Okay. Anything else?”

“Tell me a story.”

“You’re the one with the stories, Neil.” Andrew ghosted a kiss over his cheekbone. There was a sting there, a scratch Neil had landed unknowingly.

“You have some.”

Andrew settled back over him, arm braced next to Neil’s head, his other stroking through Neil’s hair. Neil clenched his own in Andrew’s t-shirt and told himself it was better to crease fabric than break his knuckles. They both ignored their own slight reactions to what Neil had done moments before. It wasn’t about that.

Neil pushed his face back into Andrew’s neck. “Okay, yeah, I have one.” He felt the vibrations in his throat and Neil realised he couldn’t have both a story and be in Andrew’s neck.

“It was about three months before Wymack scouted you,” Andrew told him. “We were playing the Trojans, an away game. Kevin convinced Nicky to watch practice games until three in the morning, so I couldn’t sleep. By the time we got to their court, we were all tired but had a game to play.”

Neil’s index and middle finger tapped out a frantic rhythm on the back of Andrew’s neck. He didn’t tell him to stop.

“A Trojan walked past Nicky, and he, in his sleep-deprived, game-exhausted state, said something about being happy to be gay, and this player turned around and winked at him. But I was stood behind Nicky. My cousin never realised the Trojan was looking at me.”

It wasn’t about the story, Neil realised; it was about the soothing deep tone of Andrew’s voice, the lull of his storytelling, that had his anxiety shrinking away. Like they were shadows and Andrew’s voice was a wave of light, chasing the darkness away.

By the time Andrew finished his story, Neil’s anxiety was a mere choppy current in his veins, a few jitters left, a tick in his thigh, feet tapping against the wall where he’d splayed his legs.

His mouth was dry but he still turned his head to kiss Andrew’s jaw, and when he felt him turn his head, he caught his mouth against his. Whatever was left of his anxiety attack, now that he remembered how to move and not panic, fully drained with the first hint of a kiss.

Andrew kissed him slowly, deeply, every second reminding Neil that he was allowed to feel something other than the endless nerves and  _ movemovemove, getoutgetout, getawaygetaway _ . It was a slow, lingering thing, with Neil’s fingers cupping Andrew’s face, and Andrew’s hand spread over Neil’s jaw.

“Good?” Andrew asked, voice reverberating in his chest, onto Neil’s.

“Good,” he whispered.

Andrew shifted his hips away from Neil’s and leaned back down to kiss him just as slowly. It was a tentative touch of his tongue to Neil’s, to see how he responded. But Neil was thrown into kissing as a distraction now that he no longer wanted to pummel a wall or himself. He made a quiet noise into Andrew’s mouth, not asking for anything more or wanting to push it. He was just content to lie there and feel more relaxed, Andrew’s mouth the only pressure left on him.

They kissed until they ran out of breath, and Neil huffed a laugh into Andrew’s neck, whilst Andrew placed Neil’s hand on his stomach again, under his t-shirt. “Breathe, Neil.”

And finally, he was able to match his breaths to Andrew’s, curled up together on the small bunk. Neil didn’t say that he was still afraid to move one limb away from this position, this safe cocoon he’d made peace with during his anxiety attack, but Andrew didn’t need that clarification. He only nipped at Neil’s neck before looking down at him.

“When you’re ready to talk about it,” he said, “I’ll be here for you.”

Neil was already shaking his head. “Nothing set it off. It just… Happens sometimes, and I can’t control it. There’s no warning. Just one moment it’s not there, the next it’s taking over every single tiny thought. Good ones turn into bad, things I love become something to dread interacting with, bad thoughts become catastrophic.”

“Does Bee know?”

Oh, Andrew and his trust in Bee. Neil kissed the question away. “ _ You  _ know.”

“But you can’t tell me. I had to figure it out by your wheezing up there.” There was a small smile, a half joke made to lighten the mood.

“I can’t deal with it alone, either. Both ways get paralysing in that moment, so nothing helps. But you did.”

Andrew linked his fingers through Neil’s. “I told you, I like your hands. I’ll always help you not break them.”

Neil smiled at that, marvelling at how the crashing storm had been reduced to something more manageable. “I’ll try to keep them safe. For you.”

Andrew placed a kiss on his temple. “Good. Can you sleep?”

Neil considered. “I’m tired but I don’t know yet. I’m still wired.”

“You’ve been on overdrive for the past hour, junkie. Let yourself lie back. You’ve got time to fall asleep.”

“Don’t let me keep you awake.”

Andrew snorted. “I wouldn’t anyway. I like sleeping too much.”

In the end, Neil didn’t move and Andrew didn’t push him onto his side so he could tuck in behind him. Andrew threw an arm over him, trying to imitate the position he did when they spooned. Neil wanted to move, wanted to curl up on his side, but he couldn’t. Anxiety, whilst subsiding, still froze his processing, still convinced him he couldn’t do a great deal. So in the end, he held Andrew’s hand over his chest, and they both felt his heartrate calm down.

When he felt Andrew’s evened-out breath on his neck, Neil finally closed his eyes and hoped he slept before anxiety could catch him back up. But then a sleepy mumble:  _ don’t run away again, Neil. _

He turned to look at Andrew but his eyes were closed, mouth parted in sleep. He was sure he had imagined it, but still he looked at the blonde boy next to him and thought that no matter how many times his brain convinced him to bolt, he wouldn’t. He would stay--because he wanted Andrew and he wanted this life with him where he could learn to relax and live and love. This life where Andrew looked at him like he mattered and meant something. This life where he had a game to play tomorrow, played as part of a notorious team.

This life, where Neil Josten meant everything.


End file.
